Welcome to the Painting Challenge. Here you will find the fabulous, fevered work from miniature painters from around the world. While participants come from every colour, gender, age and nationality, they have at least three things in common: they love miniatures, enjoy a supportive community and they have all taken the Challenge.
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Wednesday, 15 February 2017

A very small entry this week, but I've been trying to submit at least something every week, and to this point I've been successfull so let's keep this going!

I haven't painted a lot of Oldhammer this challenge, contrarily to the last few years, mostly because I've been working on my LeafGrave and Epic project, both requiring figures to play. My Chaos army has reached a good size (3000pts+) and so I feel a bit less urgency in painting figures. Which will surely change next year, when I start my second Oldhammer army...

Anyways, last saturday after a family dinner I felt like painting a single and so I settled on a nice Old School Citadel Nurgle sorcerer. I enjoy painting Nurgle figures since I like all things disgusting and horror and I especially like the hooded ones; I find they look super creepy. This one is no exception. This sculpt, released in 1989 for the Realm of Chaos line, was used, with a few modification, as the basis for two Nurgle Sorcerers; one with a staff and one with a sword. Those familiar with Citadel figures of the mid-80s know this was something often done in all their ranges; it allowed them to produce a lot of variety while keeping costs down, and apparently gamers loved variety! Stunning, I know.

You can see the two very similar Sorcerers; top right and middle of third row

The one I painted today is the sword version; I also have the staff one but him I keep for something special. So I present to you Lorhal Kuvax, Nurgle Sorcerer.

Since my Chaos undivided core force is black and poison green (a bright green), I've been trying to avoid green for my Nurgle contingent, and rather go with browns, beiges, yellow and even pinks. So for this one I went with a dirty beige, with pink details. I used just a tad of my poison green, to tie it with the rest of the force.

Of course, this being Oldhammer, a sorcerer needs a familiar! So I also painted a little freak to accompany him. One of the weirdest familiar model from the era, it's basically a gigantic mouth, but he does fit nicely stylewise with Papa Nurgle's children.

So that makes it 5 pts for the sorcerer, and I guess 3 pts for the Familiar? I'll let our Wednesday minion make the final call.

ByronM: Well, one last entry for Wednesday, thank you Iannick. I really like these soft Nurgle colours that you used,very different than the normal darker dirtier colours normally used for them. It works very well though and actually fits the old school nature of this figure. Great work, and even though the familiar is small, I am counting it as a regular figure, after all the halflings were counted that way, so why not this little pustule.

I regret to say that I've been struggling to get any traction this Challenge. Work, life and general winter malaise have all conspired to dampen my productivity, making it very difficult to stay on task. Nonetheless, I've been trying to put in a few hours each week to maintain momentum, and while I have several projects in mid-stream, I do have a small submission to offer today. This time I've returned to my 40K Inquisitorial retinue.

This is Kane Corso and 'Daisy'. They are an Arbitrator K9C Hunter/Seeker team originally part of the Adeptus Abites police force (think of a grittier version of Judge Dredd), but are now valued members of Inquisitor Rochel-Perez's retinue of espionage operatives, detectives and combat specialists.

This set of miniatures was released (I believe) as part of a Forge World special event several years ago. As can be imagined, they are quite hard to come by these days unless you know the right, ahem, contacts. In this case the source is a company named, quite appropriately, Black Market Miniatures. Anyway, I made a cautiously small order and was pleasantly surprised to receive my figures promptly, wonderfully packaged and beautifully cast in near-faultless resin.

I've painted Kane in dark green half armour, carrying a stun baton and a K9C sensory readout that is wirelessly linked to to his Cyber-Mastiff 'Daisy'.

He is festooned with purity seals indicating that he's been anointed by a priest of the Imperial cult, marking him as a man who has seen, or is about to see, some nasty, nasty things.

'Daisy' is a heavily augmented Mastiff. I was going to suggest she may be a Cane Corso (dog breed), but thought that would make a better name for her handler. :) She's obviously seen better days, what with all her pragmatically installed battle augmetics and heavy burn scaring along her side.

A good portion of her skeleton and musculature has been replaced with a reinforced chassis, cybernetics, along with neural injectors for pain-suppression, heightened senses and adrenaline boosting. Yes, it seems that the SPCA is sadly absent in the 41st millennium.

She's seen here going 'walkies' with her owner. I wonder if Kane cares about 'Imperial on-leash ordinances' and the fact that he's neglected to bring along any poo-bags? Somehow I suspect not. Thanks to Byron and the Wednesday crew for letting me horn in on their Wednesday party! Kane and Daisy should give me an eye-watering 10 points to add to my total. Nevertheless, onwards and upwards!ByronM:Welcome oh fearless leader to the Wednesday crew, and thank you for pitching in today with some content as it seems you are not alone in suffering a winter malaise and entries are slow today.

These two figures make a very nice entry. I especially like the face and skin tones on the Arbite, right down to the stubble tone on his face. I still struggle with skin tones more often than not, so it's nice to see them done well. The dark overall palette also works well, especially for something as dark and shadowy as an Inquisitorial Retinue.

As for the figures, they are lovely, and isn't is sad that lately the black market / grey market seems to put out better quality and customer service than the original source... that more than anything else drives home the fact that "some large un-named organization" has lost its way. Of course that organization is also (quite appropriately here) very good at sending out the Inquisition on a witch hunt to find those shadow organizations!

Anyway, very nice work Curt. I find that working on cool and characterful single figures like these is a great way to keep motivated, so just stick with stuff like this, it looks great.

I have wandered away from odds and ends, but that is hopefully fixed in March at the latest. I have been forced to paint reinforcements for my Slaves to Darkness army, next week is the final 2000 point round of the league, and I only have less than 1200 points ready.

Anyway, these six Chaos Warriors will give me a brand new Chaos Warrior squad when they are combined with the command group from last week. Five of these are old, two-dimensional Chaos Warriors from Warhammer and one is old, two-dimensional Chaos Warrior from HeroQuest.

Nothing special here, just more rank and file troops.

In the closeup you can see, that the red metallic paint is not attaching very well to the miniatures. For some reason it just seems to float away. And only with these miniatures. Paint some areas three times and still got white showing... In the closeup you can also see, that the painting is not very tidy, something I just couldn't push myself, when it was next to impossible to get the paint even on somewhere...

Then something else. I planned these Men of Gondor for the West Bonus Round, but since I got another idea and these were ready, I'll put them here to create a Wednesday Point Bomb.

These all are plastic Lord of the Ring warriors from the first starter kit. I have lots of these, probably too much. But I decided to paint three cloaks in blue, so I can say they are captains. They ended up quite dark and in poor light look almost like black...

Nothing special in the paint job here, either.

Black and Blue, quite difficult to tell apart sometimes?

I also finished these old Dragon Ogres, but they were started before the Challenge, so they do not count. But shows I have painted quite a lot, anyway.

Well, thats 12 25/28 sized miniatures and 60 whopping points! More Slaves to Darkness next week, even though I need to travel with family during the weekend.

ByronM: Another solid entry this week Teemu! Nice to see the old school chaos warriors still coming out of the woodwork, or is that the warp... The old school paint job still works on them, and glad to hear "someone" is enjoying the disaster that is AoS, more power to you! The blue on the cloaks for the LotR figs is very nice in the high contrast, and I really like the dragon ogres, I just find they look really odd on oval bases, but I know that's where the game has gone :-(

This time last year I was finishing up a Burgundian Ordinance army for use in Warhammer Ancient Battles. (Yes, I still play WAB!) I had been inspired for years by the work over at Je Lay Emprins and the excellent Perry minis for the range. So, I painted up some pike, longbow, knights and retainers and took them off to Cold Wars where they performed up to their historical reputation as perhaps the most overpaid/under performing army in European history. This past November I brought pretty much same army to Fall In where they fared equally badly. As anybody who runs a pike army on the tabletop will tell you, when it comes to tweaking your list the answer is always "Needs More Pike" So I cut back on the fancy Gendarmes, got rid of back rank longbow men, and put the points into more bigger blocks of pointed sticks. So here are the new recruits.

So there are a total of 28 figures here for 140 points.

ByronM: Thanks for the awesome entry Micheal, and yes I agree, "I feel the need, the need for more Pike" <said in a Christopher Walken voice>. No matter how they perform on the table, these figs look good on the table and that is far more important! There is nothing worse than wargaming with unpainted or poorly painted figures, you miss at least 80% of the joy of the game! These are lovely looking pikemen, and I like the guys done in quarters, they look great.

As for WAB, it's a great little system, certainly better than were GW has been going lately! It has all the best parts of Warhammer, and drops all the worst bits (crazy insane heroes that are better than whole units, and magic that destroys whole units for 1/10th the units cost), I call that pure win, and is the reason there are large groups that still play it.

I would have liked to hear a bit about the banners though, where are they from and could we get a side shot? Be nice to see them. I may have even been able to grant a few bonus points, but I have no idea if you made them or bought them, or anything, which is a shame, as they look good from what I can see...

EDITED: Home made banners (and nice ones at that) give you a bonus 5 points.

Not much for this week, I am working on a fairly big project (well in truth it is quite small), which I hope to have done by the end of the challenge. But each week, I will try to paint a few figures to keep going with the submissions. Most of these figures will be filling in the gaps of my skirmish collections or maybe even 18mm AB Napoleonic project.

I noticed I was down one Dark Ages Viking Hirdman, fortunately I found one in the box. A lovely figure, I am not sure which manufacturer but a joy to paint. I am also missing (I suspect it is our cat little Santini who is taking the figures) a Viking Bondi but alas none in the box, I will have to order one.

Then we have 3 missionaries from AW Miniatures (same manufacture as the canoes from last week). These are much smaller then their other figures; who knows why. I enjoyed painting them, they are interesting but I have seen better figures.

Well that is it for this week, 20 points. Maybe I will have some more Congo figures for next week.

ByronM: Four very interesting figures here John, I especially like the missionaries as they could be used for many different games as either people of interest, escort items, or even in 40k as heretics of the true faith in the Emperor that need to be captured and purged.... er.... I mean "objectives", yeah that's it, objectives. Anyway, very well done and I like the fact that you did them in multiple colours so they show up differently and really like the shading on the grey one, well done.

Woot! PolderCon survived and it was a great day. Running a game three times in a day was a new experience, and an exhausting one too. Unfortunately, the two extra bases of grenadiers refused to be done on time, but I did finish a whole pile of Light Infantry as well as a base of Jessup's loyalists. Unfortunately, not all that work counts properly for the Challenge... Nevertheless, all figures below received finishing touches (some quite a bit more than that), and were based and photographed at the same time, and got their first outing at PolderCon, so here they all are. I promise there'll be no point smuggling here!

I'd started work on Cornwallis' light infantry of the 1780 campaign for Camden and Cowpens some time ago. It consisted of the light companies of the first and second battalion, 71st of Foot, the light company of the 16th of Foot and the light company of a loyalist regiment. Obviously, these were not the five bases of light infantry I needed for Hubbardton at PolderCon, but the idea of painting another five seemed a bit daunting for now. More on those below. First, some Loyalists.

Frazer's army at Hubbardton included a company of Jessup's Loyalists. Not too much about their uniform is know, but Troiani reconstructed a soldier in a shortened red coat faced green with a plain round hat, no bayonet and wearing Indian leggings. The latter was going to be difficult, but I rummaged a while through my box of random figures, and found these leftovers from various Foundry blisters. I think they work.

First of the light infantry is a base of generic roundabout-dressed light bobs. They'll do as the light company of the Loyalist regiment until I figure out how the latter were fitted out, and which figures work best for that specific unit.

Light company of the 16th of Foot, after Troiani's painting. Built with Perry plastic British infantry, with arms from the Continentals set (so they could have basically the same pose as the other bases) and headgear from the metal Light infantry blister. Strictly speaking, they should have shortened waistcoats, but they look the part I think. Strange observation: I don't like how the plastics look until they're almost completely painted. Then they suddenly seem to 'click'. Maybe it's just me...

I finished four of these Scotsman earlier last year and started on the other four shortly before the start of the Challenge. Mostly because I have awesome planning skills when it comes to the hobby...

And finally, three bases of skirmishing light infantrymen in roundabouts (Foundry figs) and a base of charging light infantry (Perry metals and plastic). The latter as well as five of the former were done quite some time ago and just rebased. Four of the roundabout-clad figs were completed this weekend, but I started them before December 20th.

So, all in all a long blog for not too many points. The true participants in the Challenge are 14 figures, for 70 points in total.ByronM: A great start to a Wednesday here from Jasper, with various excellent black powder units, a large number of which have been converted to be more accurate to the period he is doing. All of them are extremely well painted as well. Amazing clear brushwork Jasper and great colours and groundwork as well. My favourite is the first batch though with the striped trousers and the officer holding his hat by his side which are great, and then on top of that the flesh tones and facial expressions there are stunning! Amazing work!